The Head sat up, clasping his knees with his arms, and without answering David began the Ode again in that extraordinary voice of his, this time not looking at his book. He began in tones so low that it needed an effort to hear him; it boomed out over “charioted by Bacchus and his pards”; it sounded like a breeze at night in the stanza “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet”; again it shook with emotion over the “sad heart of Ruth,” and David felt a lump rise in his throat, a mysteriously blissful misery took possession of him. And when the Head finished he found himself smiling at him with mouth that trembled a little. There was silence a moment. “That will do for to-day,” said the Head. “You can go.” The group rose from the grass with alacrity, for though Keats was all very well, an extra half-hour at the bathing-place, for the lesson had been very short, was even better. But in spite of the permission David lingered. “Did he write much else, sir?” he said. The Head handed him the volume. “You may see for yourself,” he said. “Give it me back when you’ve finished with it.” David deposited this in his desk in the museum, and then ran after the others to the bathing-place, with lines still ringing in his head, but untying and unbuttoning as he went so as to lose as few seconds as possible before the first heavenly plunge out of the heat and baking sunlight into the cool arms of the water. That, too, on this morning of vivid life was more consciously delicious than ever before, when with a long run he sprang, an arrow of gleaming limbs, off the header-board which he left vibrating with his leap, and burrowed into the cool embrace of the water. Some flower must have opened in his brain to-day, quickening his sense of living, and though no whit less boyish than before, he was far more conscious of the water and the sun, and above all of himself.